Schmidt admits that he thought the "don't be evil" slogan was stupid when he first came to Google

In a recent interview with NPR, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said that he used to think his company's famous slogan -- "don't be evil" -- was stupid.

NPR host Peter Sagal interviewed Schmidt recently on a segment called "Not My Job," which humorously speaks with important leaders and includes a game of some sort.

Sagal asked Schmidt how Google came up with the slogan, "don't be evil."

"Well, it was invented by Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin]," said Schmidt. "And the idea was that we don't quite know what evil is, but if we have a rule that says don't be evil, then employees can say, I think that's evil. Now, when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there's no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something.

"So what happens is, I'm sitting in this meeting, and we're having this debate about an advertising product. And one of the engineers pounds his fists on the table and says, that's evil. And then the whole conversation stops, everyone goes into conniptions, and eventually we stopped the project. So it did work."

Sagal then humorously accused Schmidt of being the "businessman" type out of the group (among Page and Brin) who felt that an American business couldn't be evil.

"You're coming in, like, you're a businessman who's been successful in all kinds of Silicon Valley business," said Sagal. "And you come in, and you're like this thing about not being evil, that'll never work in American business. What, are you crazy, kids?"

Sagal and Schmidt discussed a few other topics as well, such as Google Glass. Sagal asked Schmidt what the glasses are used for exactly.

"Well, we don't quite know yet," said Schmidt. "We have maybe 2,000 of these. We've shipped them out to developers, and we're seeing what they develop. There's obviously issues, shall we say, of appropriateness of how people are going to use these things. There's a right time to have Google Glass on, and there's a right time to have it off, if you take my drift.

"So kind of watch and see what people do with it and then decide what to do."

I just love how people think that the vast majority of what was in the 60s or 80s Star Trek TV shows has already been done! NOT!

You think your smartphone is a tricorder? Does your smartphone do chemical analysis? Spectral analysis? Scan for frequencies from about DC to gamma rays? Measure cellular mutation rates in real time? Do deep body scans for organ anomalies, including cancers? Measure local variations in time flux?

Does your smartphone allow to you connect to space platforms (starships in Star Trek but satellites today) that are in geostationary orbit or beyond? Talk to people the other side of the world without local infrastructure (lots of episodes were on primitive planets)?

Sure, your smartphone is about the size of a 60s Star Trek communicator, but it's lucky if it can connect to a cell tower three or four miles away.

I always thought LaForge's "banana comb" visor was the dumbest concept in all of Star Trek -- and that includes all the different series and all the movies too.

As soon as they figure out to have quintuply redundant Heisenberg Compensators as well as macroscopic quantum tunneling we'll have transporters. Roddenberry repeatedly said that the existence of the transporter in Star Trek as inconsistent with the rest of the technology in the show.